


A Clockwork Love

by capalxii



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, F/M, Fae & Fairies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 19:56:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3353363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cyberkinetic Laboratories' anatomically representative android meets a shapeshifting fairy prince. Minor bit of blood in one part, though not graphic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Clockwork Love

The moon shone brightly that night, bright enough that the shapes of things both real and imagined could be seen through the shadows of the forest; calm and cool, with only the occasional whisper of wind through the trees, carrying the scent of pine and dying leaves on the air, it was easy to witness movement formed out of the darkness, and easier still for the imagination to give breath and life to those movements. 

For those who had imagination, this was perhaps frightening, or delightful in a terrifying way, or simply distracting and unnerving. And it was with that notion that the wide-eyed young woman peered out of her window, to see a silver owl perched high in a jagged bare branch, staring right back at her. 

“Speak,” she said, but the owl took flight, and flew and flew and flew until even her eyes lost sight of it.

*

Yet the owl returned, and she noticed the next night. But she ignored the creature and brushed her hair—counting each stroke as she had learned to do, slow and methodical, and did not ask it to speak.

Instead, she opened the window. When the owl flew in and landed on the broad windowsill, she remained silent, and when the owl continued to stare at her as though to study her, she turned her back on it.

“Speak,” said the owl, and she whipped around with a gasp. 

*

The owl was no owl.

Crouched, balanced precariously but confidently on the sill, was a man. At first glance, his hair looked silver on the crown of his head and black at the nape of his neck, but the black, oh the black was not as it seemed. Circling around the base of his skull were raven feathers, silky to the touch, shining in the pale evening light, soft and smooth and strange to see. Neither an owl nor a man, but a changeling. “Speak,” he said again, his voice the very sound of a breeze rattling dry leaves. 

“I've already spoken,” said the woman. She had no feathers, no wings that he could see. She was an odd thing herself, with only two arms and two legs to her name. “State your purpose.”

The changeling blinked. “I don't believe I have one. Do I have one?” He dropped to the floor and walked to her, quietly and slowly. “What is your purpose?”

“I am a person,” she said, “and that is my purpose.”

“Then I am also a person,” said he.

She reached slowly to the feathers just beyond his temple, frowned, and cocked her head to the side. “People don't have feathers.”

*

It was told that there lived in the forest a single solitary fairy prince. A shapeshifter who walked alone, who flew alone, slithered on the ground alone. Sweet to lost children, a devil to anyone else, the legend told of a shadow creature who lived a thousand years and had lost a thousand brothers and sisters. The legend told of a creature who ran from touch.

But the changeling found her touch warm and inviting; perhaps the legends had been slightly misleading. 

*

“I have feathers,” he said, “and I am a person.”

She took this in, frowned, and then smiled—bright as the moon, the sun, the shimmer of light on a lake. “Well then,” she said. “What's your name?”

This, he did not have. He was called many things, known under many titles, but a word that was his own and that was him—he had never needed one, and never felt it missing until now. “What would you like it to be?”

The wide-eyed young woman brushed her fingers against his plumes, wondering, learning. “The Doctor. That is what most people seem to be named, I think.”

“Then I am the Doctor. What's your name?” 

*

The woman did not quite know what to make of this person; most people she knew did not have feathers, contrary to what he'd said, though she was willing to learn that some people did and that was fine. But people also did not shift from biped to bird, that she knew to be true, so what was he that he could?

A person without a name. A person she had to give a name to. Or: a not-person, she told herself with confidence, who was perhaps still in the process of becoming a person. Like her.

She was familiar with the concept: her own name had been given only upon asking. “Clara,” another doctor-person had said, and she had looked at the clipboard in his hand and read CL-ARA. Clara had been a name for the nameless, the machine that was not to look like a machine or act like one, and she had smiled because a name was one step closer to her true purpose. 

Now she smiled because this not-person in front of her had asked her the same thing she had asked so long ago, and this time she was the one giving rather than being given. It was better to give than to receive, she had learned that somewhere, somehow, and she knew it to be true; there was a sense of warmth through her body when he took the name she'd given him. 

When he asked her what her own name was, she said, “My name is Clara,” and took his hand in hers.

*

People, Clara told the Doctor, quite often held hands. He wasn't so sure of this. He knew people from a distance, with their loud metal beasts and loud metal weapons, a magic he didn't understand and sometimes feared, that could destroy his world and had destroyed so much of it already—they could not hold hands, or touch their lips to one another's to show their trust, or curl against each other to withstand the cold. People were frightful.

Persons, however, were different. Clara was a person, and so now was he—or at least, so he wished he might be, if that was what Clara wanted. She was the first person in hundreds of years he had seen up close, the first face in so long to be properly seared into him. And Clara took his hand, and it was soft, warm, a promise of both things to come and safety through those things. He looked down at her small hand in his, and asked, “Would you like to come with me?”

At this, she frowned. “I am not allowed.”

This was strange to him. He was allowed the earth and the sky, the trees and caves and clouds and rivers. Surely people were allowed nearly the same? “Why not?”

“I have been told,” she said. “My programming does not allow it.”

A great sadness overcame him, and he cursed whatever god or devil had made this so. But he took her other hand in his and asked, “May I then stay with you?”

She smiled again; he realized that he could stay for centuries under the light of that smile. “Yes.”

*

He stayed until the creeping dawn began to bring a different light to the room. Then he was away, his face darkening with regret and frustration before he changed into his other form to fly home. Clara thought she might understand that regret, and found herself distracted through her day. People came in and asked her questions, hooked wires into her, and she could not bring herself to fully comply with their tests, for the memory of the Doctor leaving. 

If this was human too, she wondered, then why would she want it?

Her answer came that night, when he returned. As she watched him swoop into her open window, the regret of the day only made the hope of the night sweeter. 

“Can you come tonight?” he asked, and she shook her head no. So he stayed, crouched at the foot of her bed, telling stories of flying through the air, of befriending the creatures in the wood, of the world outside her laboratory with all its wonders. 

*

He left the next morning and came again the next night, and did the same the day after that, and Clara found herself growing restless. The people who'd made her were too, confused and troubled by the changes in her, in how she no longer submitted to them, except for the one who had always been kind, the one who had given her a name when she had asked. 

So when he asked her, after everyone else had gone home, what was wrong, she told him, “I think I know love.”

He blinked, slowly, and said, “How do you know?”

“Because I am impatient when he is gone, and want to slow down time when he is back,” she said. 

“And who is he?”

“A man with feathers for hair, who comes and goes as he pleases,” she said. The kind one nodded, though she didn't think he believed her. “Record the night. You will see.”

He nodded again, and that night, she helped him set up a camera.

*

“We are being watched,” she said; the Doctor looked around but could see no one. “He is doing it remotely, he isn't here.”

“Why?” he asked.

“So that he knows you are real. Do not worry, Doctor, I trust him.”

The Doctor had told her his fear of people. He had told her that they hurt, and were cruel. She had not seemed surprised, even as he told her of magic that she had not been familiar with. But if she trusted this one person, well, persons were different from people after all, and Clara was proof of that. “I trust you,” he said.

Still, he didn't want to speak, afraid of how people listening might take his words. So he lay next to her instead, and held her close to him as his hearts beat loud in his own ears, so loud that he could not even hear hers.

*

The kind one spent the rest of the next day looking at Clara strangely. The other doctor-people ignored her, speaking only amongst themselves, and she overheard words like, “reset,” like, “memory wipe,” like, “blank slate.” 

It was only later, in the milky twilight, that the kind one came to her and said, “I have to do something to you, Clara. And you have to promise me that you do this one last thing for me.”

“I promise,” she said.

“I'm going to change your programming,” he said. “And before a week passes, I need you to run away.”

“What will you change it to do?” she asked, but he was already opening her access panel, already connecting wires to her.

She found out soon enough. The world opened up to her, every possibility a real one, ones that she could choose if she pleased or turn away from if she pleased. Her kiss surprised him, and the feel of his beard against her skin surprised her, and she understood love here as well. “When I run, can you follow me?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I disabled your location tracking and wiped the code. I can't follow you, but nobody else can either. You will be safe.” 

She knew what missing felt like, and she knew she would miss this man. But she also knew hope, and the promise of it that he was giving her, and she knew gratefulness. “Then I will always remember you,” she said with sadness. 

“Do,” he said with a smile. “And I will always remember you, Clara.”

*

The Doctor did not come that night, or the next. The people of the day did not come either, not even the kind one named Pink who was not pink at all, and she sat waiting.

The third night, she lay in bed wondering if she should run and hope that the Doctor found her, when she heard a scraping outside her window.

The owl, its wing bloodied, crawled inside her room, and collapsed as the man to her floor.

*

“They are cruel,” he whispered to her, even as she dressed the wound on his arm and stroked his hair and his feathers so gently. “They harm for fun. Clara, please come away with me, do not listen to your programming.”

“I don't have that programming anymore,” she said, and his hearts leaped. “One person is not cruel, and he showed me free will. I will come with you tonight.”

Though he was weakened from the wound, from the iron that had cut through him as much as the cut itself, the Doctor found the strength in him to take her hands in his and pull her to the window. “Where would you like to go?”

“We will hide first so that you may heal,” she said, “and then we will go wherever we can.”

He nodded, and then frowned. “Clara, are you sure you're a person?”

“I am,” she said steadfastly. “And I am a good one.”

“I am not,” he confessed. “Is that all right?”

She kissed him and then kissed him again. “You are who you are, and I will love you regardless.”

So they hid, and they ran, and when his magic and her clockwork found a way to mend each other, they flew and flew and flew until no other person could find them, forever until the end of all things.


End file.
